Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 3

  None of the workers on the road faces towards Annie. What she sees from where she stands are the backs of the men and women, the sharp start of the axes at the top of their arc, the surge downwards to earth. Annie is the only one on the road who is not working. She looks around for her axe, thinking she may have left it on the grass at the edge of the road, that she must have put it down for just a moment. But, no, it is not at the side of the road. It is not anywhere.

  The dust rises like smoke above the heads of the workers. Roils like water. Rises into clouds and muscles away into the far blue of the sky.

  Annie touches the shoulder of the woman nearest to her. Perhaps she will know where Annie’s axe has got to. The woman turns towards her, and in that moment the whole crew of road workers also turns and Annie sees, to her horror, that all of them, men and women alike, have her face. All of these people are her.

  Annie wakes, lies in her bed, listening to the dark. Her breath stoppered in her throat. At Portman Square the noises were all above her basement-kitchen room. Lying in her cot there she heard the house creaking and shuddering over her, Mrs. Gilbey walking among the rooms with tiny, sharp steps, like the sound of tacks being hammered in. At the Dashells’, Annie is as high as sound can go. Above her is the roof, above that the night sky. Her thoughts can leave her head and rise right up into the trees, into the dark clouds covering the moon. There is nothing to net them.

  This new house is noisier than Mrs. Gilbey’s. It is bigger, sprawls out, isn’t straight up and contained like the brick town house in Portman Square. Someone always seems to be going up and down the staircase. A window shuts. A window opens.

  “Tess,” whispers Annie. She wants to be reassured that this is the real world. She wants to know that Tess, curled up on her side in her bed across the room, doesn’t have Annie’s face, too. But Tess is asleep. Annie can hear the deep shaking of her breathing.

  When she lived with Mrs. Gilbey there would sometimes be days when Annie never spoke a word. Mrs. Gilbey wanted her Marys to do only what was required. She never asked Annie anything, or engaged her in conversation. Sometimes, when she hadn’t used her voice for a while and was suddenly required to, it would come out all hoarse and ghostly and not like hers at all.

  “Lord,” she whispers into the darkness. “Take this dream away from me.” Annie closes her eyes, opens them again. The room ripples with her words, each one eddying gently around her. If she twists her neck towards the window, she can just see the bright thorns of stars in the sky. If she closes her eyes, she can see the road and the flail of axes, like swimmers crawling through the dusty air.

  At the beginning of Annie’s first work-day she gets up at 6:30, says a few furtive prayers as she washes her face, and then goes down to the kitchen. Cook has already cleaned, black-leaded, and lit the range, gives Annie a cup of tea before she sends her off to sweep the front hall. At Mrs. Gilbey’s, Annie was forbidden to drink tea because it had been rationed once years before and that had made Mrs. Gilbey consider it too valuable to be wasted on a maid.

  Mr. Dashell rises early to get work done before breakfast, so there is no need to wake him. At 7:30, Annie is sent up with hot water and tea for Isabelle. She knocks on the door. No response. She knocks again. Finally she puts her tray down, opens the door, and enters the room. Isabelle is asleep, lying on her side, curled up in a ball under the covers. Annie sloshes the hot water into the basin. She bumps the jug against the basin, pours the tea, and sets the teapot down on the bedside table. Nothing. She picks up the teapot and sets it down again. Louder.

  “Oh, hello, Annie.” Isabelle struggles to a sitting position,her hair loose and wild. She waves her hands around as if she’s trying to haul herself up out of the sleeping world. “Is it morning already?”

  “It is, ma’am.” Annie gathers up the water jug and teapot. She can feel Mrs. Dashell watching her. Mr. Rochester, she thinks. In this house, it is Mrs. Dashell who is the grumpy and intense master. It is not the polite Mr. Dashell she met on the path yesterday. When she looks up she sees that Mrs. Dashell has slumped down in her bed again. Annie leaves the room quietly.

  In the kitchen Tess is at the table, just finishing her breakfast. She slides down the bench to make room for Annie. “There you go,” she says. She does not appear to have held a grudge about the beds. Annie is glad of this, sits down for tea and porridge. “Is this right?” says Cook, at the stove, boiling Annie’s egg.

  Tess looks up. “There won’t be a stove, will there?” she says.

  “But the attitude,” says Cook.

  “I don’t want to be rude, missus, but it’s mostly your backside I’m seeing.” Tess stands up from the table, knocks her knife onto the floor. On purpose, Annie thinks.

  “Ooooh,” says Tess. “Dropped my knife. Looks as if I’ll be seeing a strange man before nightfall.” She giggles. “Better go and make myself beautiful,” she says, and leaves for the laundry, a brick building just off the kitchen in the back garden.

  Annie’s cleaning duties are such that she does not need to rush between chores, as she had to at Portman Square, but can even lift her head sometimes to listen to a bird outside or watch how the light brushes a painting in the drawing room. Here, there is no need to scrub the stone steps and flags every day, as she did in London. Here, people do not step over her as though she did not exist. When she was on her hands and knees on the staircase, cleaning the rods, Mr. Dashell stepped around her and even said, “Good morning, Annie,” as he passed. Here, it does not seem that her work will constantly be found fault with. In fact it is just the opposite, the Lady and Master do not care enough about the household management. They leave all the instructions up to Cook.

  After Mr. Dashell has passed by her on the stairs, Annie sits up and arches her spine to stop her back from hurting.” ‘Why am I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, forever condemned?’” she says softly. It is her favourite phrase from Jane Eyre. She used to say it to herself at Mrs. Gilbey’s. It made her feel better, saying it, there where she was browbeaten, accused, condemned, and always, always suffering.

  Annie wipes her forehead. Upstairs she can hear the voices of Eldon and Isabelle. She still feels full from her generous breakfast. The house is warm and comfortable. Perhaps it is time to read Jane Eyre again. Perhaps, now, there is a more appropriate phrase for Annie to choose as her own.

  Eldon knocks at his wife’s bedroom door and then walks in without waiting for a reply. Isabelle is sitting by the window. She is dressed, but her hair is still down.

  “Oh,” she says when she sees it is Eldon. “I thought you were the new maid.”

  “She’s cleaning the stair rods.” Eldon moves into the room, not quite as far as his wife. “Do we need clean stair rods?”

  “I’m sure we’d perish without them. I know I would. What do you think of the new maid?”

  “She seems a nice girl.”

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” says Isabelle. “I thought I could photograph her when I first saw her. But now I’m not sure about any of that. Models. My ideas.”

  They look at one another.

  “I was on the hunt for my spectacles.”

  “You don’t need an excuse to enter my bedroom,” says Isabelle.

  “But I found them.” Eldon waves them feebly at her. “Must have fallen asleep reading in bed last night.” He can remember when they were first married how he never wanted to leave his wife’s bed. Now, being married has somehow made him feel more alone than if he’d never married at all. The small distance between them whistles with loneliness.

  “Why aren’t you in the studio?” Eldon comes back to his original thought when he’d walked down the corridor and seen his wife’s closed door.

  “I’m trying to decide whether or not I’m a failure.”

  “And?”

  “Eldon.” Isabelle puts out a hand and he takes it. They are that near to one another. He takes the hand and it is cool and dry. “Will I ever be taken seriously?
”

  “Robert Hill?” he asks, remembering yesterday’s visit from their famous neighbour, who mostly seemed to come and see them when he was bored with his own work.

  “They’re all Robert Hills,” says Isabelle.

  Eldon sees the injustice of it as he sees everything, a map before his mind’s eye with the country of Women made up of the villages Injustice, Servitude, Inequality, Humility. “I would stop it,” he says wildly. “In my world, there will be opportunity for all.”

  “But, Eldon,” says Isabelle. “There are more Robert Hills than there are your kind in this world.” She withdraws her hand from his moist palm. “That is one sad truth. Another is that most people agree with Robert Hill.”

  From the window Isabelle can see down into the garden. The wind ruffles the leaves on the trees. Tess stands outside the laundry hut, talking to Wilks. Isabelle thinks that Wilks has been hiding all morning in the orchard, thought she saw him earlier, walking over the rusty cobbles of apples.

  Eldon would put things to rights if he had the power to do so. Isabelle is certain of that. He has an innate sense of fairness. It is his most dependable, and perhaps most lovable, characteristic. But what he wants to change of the world will never be changed. She is also certain of this, and so his wild outbursts of indignation on her behalf cause her to feel a certain wariness towards him, a politeness, an unfamiliarity with this man who is her husband and has been for thirteen years.

  Eldon can see that Isabelle’s brief need of him is over. Her pulling away makes him want to proclaim something even more remote and impossible. I will make you famous. I will be the answer to all your hopes and wishes. The territory that is himself grows larger, pushes back the salt tides, the broken chains of islands, flung like broken crockery onto the top shelf of the world.

  Tess’s laughter drifts up from the garden below, light and hopeful as the wind it rides on. Isabelle can’t imagine that she has ever sounded as recklessly happy as that.

  “I had better go and see about lunch,” she says, although this is something she never does and they both know it. She brushes past her husband on her way out of the room and they both, instinctively, flinch.

  *

  Annie is outside cleaning her dusters. She taps them against the wall of the house and dust rises like smoke from the feathers. It is a warm day. She stands with her back against the wall of the house, feeling the heat weeping onto her skin from the stones.

  There is great activity in the glasshouse. Even from this distance Annie can see the fluttering of dark figures in the building. She cannot help herself. She walks over to the henhouse and gently slips in through the door.

  Wilks, the gardener, is standing at the far end of the studio. He is dressed in what looks like a tablecloth, pinned at his throat so that it becomes a cape. On his head is a rough sort of crown fashioned from painted cardboard. On his legs, breeches. On his feet, boots. Tess is lying on her stomach on the floor in front of him, clutching on to his ankle. Her hair is loose and washes out from her head like seaweed, matted and wild. She is wrapped in a sheet.

  “You’re not trying to trip him up,” says Isabelle, circling them madly. “You’re begging him for forgiveness, begging him to take you back.”

  “I don’t need to be forgiven,” says Tess. Her voice sounds a bit muffled because she’s lying on her face.

  “Don’t,” says Wilks irritably.

  “What?” says Isabelle.

  “She’s cutting off my circulation.” Wilks shakes his leg as though Tess is a pesky dog he’s trying to dislodge.

  “He’s the one what should be begging for forgiveness,” says Tess.

  “You’re not Tess,” says Isabelle slowly. “This is not now. You have to leave yourself behind.”

  Even Annie, with her limited acquaintance of her fellow maid, knows that Tess could only ever be Tess. She would have great trouble leaving herself behind.

  Wilks flaps his tablecloth cape impatiently.

  “Who are they meant to be, ma’am?” Annie asks, stepping forward into the room.

  Isabelle looks at Annie for a moment before answering. “Guinevere,” she says, pointing to Tess. “King Arthur.” She taps Wilks on the shoulder. “Do you know the story?”

  Annie shakes her head. She has read mosdy novels, is not so familiar with the old tales.

  “Guinevere and Arthur are married,” says Isabelle quickly. “Guinevere has fallen in love with Lancelot, one of her husband’s knights. They are discovered. Lancelot is banished. Guinevere is forced to beg forgiveness from her husband.”

  “And is she truly sorry, ma’am?”

  “No.” Isabelle thinks of Robert Hill, thinks that it is herself on the floor grabbing on to his ankle, begging to be accepted into the society of the gentlemen painters. “No, she is more sorry that she was found out and that her husband banished her love.”

  Annie feels banished, cast out from the life she has known, washed up on the unfamiliar shores of this world. “Let me try,” she says. They stare at each other across the sun-streaked room.

  Isabelle is surprised at Annie’s request. Certainly anyone, or indeed anything, will be better than the idiot laundry-maid. “All right,” she says.

  “Thank the Lord,” says Tess. She struggles to her feet, ripping the sheet from her body in a gesture of glorious relief. “May I be excused now, ma’am?”

  “Yes, yes.” Isabelle rescues the sheet and winds it around Annie. Tess leaves without a backwards glance. Wilks watches her go.

  Isabelle reaches up and removes the pins from Annie’s hair. She loosens the hair from its tight nest with the same impatient, careless motion that Annie had used to ruffle the feather dusters against the house wall. She lets one hand linger on her maid’s head for an instant. “Are you sure?” she says. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes. I think so.” But the moment she says this Annie also thinks, What do I understand? She has been swayed by the story, by words like banished and forgiveness. She hasn’t had a book to read lately and that feeling of story rushes through her like a swoon.

  Wilks stands up straight, flicks his tablecloth so it hangs properly from his shoulders. Annie arranges herself at his feet. The stone floor is cold and hard. When she reaches out for Wilks’s ankle it is a relief to find it warm, to feel the heat of him through his boots.

  “All right, Wilks,” says Isabelle, moving back beside her camera. “Look down at Guinevere. A litde scorn, a litde pity,” she says, as though she’s reciting a cake recipe. “Some anger. Some hurt. A little love. And, Annie. You hate him but you need him to let you in, I mean, take you back. You need him to forgive you.”

  Forgive me my trespasses

  Annie is lonely for Jesus. She wants him back, wants him here. She reaches out with everything inside her and holds on to him for that moment before he will notice and pull away.

  Then Annie remembers Isabelle, raises her head from the floor and turns it so she can see the Lady over her shoulder, all the while holding tightly to Jesus’ ankle.

  Is this what you want from me?

  Isabelle has never seen a gaze so sublimely sorrowful as Annie Phelan’s. It is perfect. That searching sadness just right, so too that she would be looking backwards. Of course what matters is what’s gone, not what is there. Guinevere is looking back at her love for Lancelot, not up in humility at her husband. She has not forgotten the true nature of her heart. She looks back fully aware of what it is she had and what it is she has lost. She looks back out of love, out of witness, out of remembrance. She looks back out of faith.

  Isabelle can’t take her eyes off Annie for fear that look will drain out of her. “Don’t move,” she says, and rushes quickly to the table with the prepared glass plate and the bottle of collodion. “Don’t move,” she mutters to herself, over and over again, as she pours the collodion onto the plate and tilts the excess back into the bottle, as she waits a moment for the plate to become sticky and then plunges it into the silver-nitrate bath. />
  Annie has not moved. Her gaze is as direct and mournful as when Isabelle left her to attend to the plate. Isabelle inserts the wooden holder into the camera. “Don’t move,” she says, one final time, and lifts the cover off the lens.

  Annie’s neck hurts and her eyes are starting to ache from staring so intently at Isabelle.

  Let me in, thinks Isabelle, for Annie, for herself, and the Robert Hills of the world.

  O Lord, thinks Annie. Don’t leave me. I cannot bear for you to go.

  The light carves them out of air. The folds of King Arthur’s cape, the darkness of his hair. Light cuts around them, holds them as silhouettes. The long shape of Annie on the stone floor of the studio, pitched forward, looking back.

  Isabelle leads Annie down the narrow stone steps into the old coal cellar, which is far from the house, out near the middle of the garden. A new, larger cellar has been recently attached onto the kitchen. Isabelle carries the wet glass plate in its holder with one hand, grasps Annie’s sleeve with the other.

  “My darkroom,” she says, pushing forward with her feet until she feels the metal basin of developer. She bends down, dragging Annie with her.

  The cellar still smells of coal, the dusky bloom of it flowering in the bricks, in the air.

  Isabelle and Annie kneel by the tub while Isabelle pours developer into it and then immerses the glass plate. It is as big as a book, and she has to be careful that she has covered all of it. She counts the developing time off under her breath. She has brought Annie with her because she can’t let her go yet, can’t let her move beyond this moment, this photograph.

  Annie can smell the coal. She can hear the quick sounds of Isabelle breathing beside her, and over that the slide of liquid pouring over the negative plate. Crouched in the dark in this small hole of a room they are like animals, hiding. She feels both panicky and calm.